Eulogy Examples for a Wife

Eileen and I were married for fifty-two years, and I want to open with a confession: I did not write this by myself. No one who knew my wife will be surprised. Eileen wrote lists — on the backs of envelopes, in the margins of the parish bulletin, up the side of my crossword — and it turns out she left one for me, which I found on Tuesday in her bedside drawer, and which I will come back to, if you'll allow an old man to build a little suspense. She taught me that trick. 'Arthur,' she used to say, 'you tell the ending first. It's a wonder anyone lets you finish a story.'

I met Eileen in June of 1971, at her sister's engagement party, where I asked her to dance and she said, 'All right, but I lead.' I laughed. She did not. Fifty-two years, three children, and seven grandchildren later, I can report that she led the entire time, and that everywhere she steered us turned out to be exactly where we ought to have gone. She taught the infant class at St. Brigid's for thirty-four years — the five-year-olds, on purpose, because she said that was the last age at which a person could still be convinced the world was interesting. This town is full of grown men and women who learned to read at her knee. Three of them are carrying her today.

The lists were how she loved. Our fridge held the master list for half a century, in her small square handwriting, and the whole family steered by it like sailors by a light: bin day, birthdays, 'ARTHUR — GUTTERS,' underlined twice, which grandchild had exams and needed a phone call, which neighbor was just home from hospital and needed a casserole. When the Nolans' boy went through his bad patch, his name appeared on our fridge without comment, and dinners went round to that house every Thursday for a year. She never announced her kindness. She scheduled it.

She was not restful, my wife. She was right about directions with a consistency I found frankly oppressive, and if I ignored the instruction she would sit in silence and let the wrong road unspool in front of me for miles before remarking, mildly, 'Lovely scenery out this way.' She could not whisper — her whisper during Mass was audible in the car park, Father, and I apologize for forty years of it. And she named the killer in every detective program by the second advert, out loud, and was never once wrong, which she considered an improvement to the program and I considered grounds for separate televisions. We never got them. I'd have missed her being right.

Fifty-two years is mostly small. It's her cold feet arriving on my side of the bed every winter night since 1972. It's two teas — one strong, one barely a rumor of tea. It's knowing from the sound of her key in the door what kind of day it had been, and having the kettle on accordingly. The last couple of years, as she slowed, the lists got shorter and the handwriting got larger, and then I was doing the writing while she dictated from her chair, and I understood — slowly, because she let me get there myself, which was her way — that I was being trained. She was a teacher to the very end. I was the last child at her knee, and she was teaching me the hardest lesson she had.

Which brings me to the envelope in the drawer. On the front, in the big late handwriting: 'For Arthur — things to remember.' Inside, a list. The gutter man's number. Tablets with food, not tea. The grandchildren's birthdays in order, with the instruction 'cards AND money, don't be clever.' And at the bottom, in the small square handwriting she must have been saving up for it: 'You were never once a chore. All my love, E.' Eileen Mary, you led, and following you was the great privilege of my life. I'll do everything on the list. And I'll tell this room the ending first, one last time, since you can't stop me: we were happy. That's the ending, everyone. We were so happy.

My wife Sarah got the lyrics wrong. I want to start there, because it is the truest thing I know about her. Every song, every genre, sixteen years — she got the words wrong and sang them anyway, at full volume, with the confidence of a woman headlining a stadium. The kitchen radio went on when the cooking started, and whatever came out of it, Sarah answered with something that was almost, but never quite, the song. I corrected her exactly once, in 2011. She looked at me with genuine pity and said, 'Babe. My version is better.' Nina, Jack — write that on everything you own. Your mother's entire philosophy in four words: my version is better.

We met when I wrecked my shoulder playing pickup basketball at thirty, and she was the physical therapist assigned to rebuild it — which she did, while also, and she denied to the end that this was deliberate, extending my treatment plan two weeks past any clinical justification. I proposed a year later. She said, 'Obviously.' I should have recognized that as the last time I would ever surprise her. Sarah spent twenty years putting broken people back together, and her patients loved her because she had no interest whatsoever in who you had been before you got hurt. 'We start from here,' she'd tell them. 'Here is fine. Here is workable.' I have thought about those words every single day for the last year and a half.

She was, let the record show, a lot. She volunteered for everything — team snacks, the school auction, other people's moving days — and then complained about the volunteering, gloriously, at length, while signing up for more. She left every cabinet door in our kitchen open, permanently, so the house always looked mid-burglary. And she showed our children no mercy at any board game, ever. Jack, you remember the Monopoly incident: she took your last forty dollars — you were ten, she had a hotel on Boardwalk — and when I said, 'Sarah, he's ten,' she sang, to a tune that has never existed, 'the bank feels no mercy, and neither do I.' You beat her at Uno the following week, buddy. She was furious. She was so proud.

The last year and a half, she ran her illness the way she ran her clinic: we start from here; here is workable. And she kept singing. The radio went on when the cooking started, even when I was the one cooking, even in the weeks when the music came from a phone speaker on a hospital tray instead of the kitchen counter. She would not let the house go quiet — she was ferocious about it — because she understood, long before the rest of us would admit anything, that she was teaching us what this house is supposed to sound like.

Nina and Jack, here is what I know for certain. You each have your shoebox — the notes she spent four months writing in her own hand while claiming, quote, 'not to be sentimental about it.' Read them slowly; make them last. But you also have the thing no box can hold: you two were the songs she never got wrong. Not once. Not a single word.

Sarah — babe. The cabinet doors are all open, and I find I can't close them anymore. The radio went on this morning while I made the eggs, and Nina sang, and she got the words wrong, and Jack laughed for the first time in nine days, and I stood there at the stove thinking: there she is. There's my wife. Your version was better, love. It was always better. We'll sing it your way from here.